It began three and a half billion years ago in a pool of muck, when
a molecule made a copy of itself and so became the ultimate ancestor of
all earthly life.

It began four million years ago, when brain volumes began climbing rapidly
in the hominid line.

Fifty thousand years ago with the rise of Homo sapiens sapiens.Ten thousand years ago with the invention of civilization.
Five hundred years ago with the invention of the printing press.
Fifty years ago with the invention of the computer.

In less than thirty years, it will end.

At some point in the near future, someone will come up with a method
of increasing the maximum intelligence on the planet - either coding
a true Artificial Intelligence or enhancing
human intelligence. An enhanced human would be better at thinking
up ways of enhancing humans; would have an "increased capacity for invention".
What would this increased ability be directed at? Creating the next
generation of enhanced humans.

And what would those doubly enhanced minds do? Research methods
on triply enhanced humans, or build AI minds operating at computer speeds.
And an AI would be able to reprogram itself, directly, to run faster
- or smarter. And then our crystal ball explodes, "life as
we know it" is over, and everything we know goes out the window.

"Here I had tried a straightforward extrapolation of technology,
and found myself precipitated over an abyss. It's a problem we face
every time we consider the creation of intelligences greater than our own.
When this happens, human history will have reached a kind of singularity
- a place where extrapolation breaks down and new models must be applied
- and the world will pass beyond our understanding."
-- Vernor Vinge, True Names and Other Dangers,
p. 47.

There are multiple paths to the Singularity. Nanotechnology
- the ability to build computers atom by atom and rewire brains neuron
by neuron. Artificial
Intelligence, self-understanding and self-enhancing seed
AI. We could bootstrap our way to the Singularity via the relatively
mild enhanced humans produced by neurohacking.
Direct neuron-to-silicon interfaces could improve human intelligence or
computer intelligence or both. Or some completely unanticipated breakthrough
could occur.

A civilization with high technology is unstable; it ends when the species
destroys itself or improves on itself. If the current trends continue
- if we don't run up against some unexpected theoretical cap on intelligence,
or turn the Earth into a radioactive wasteland, or bury the planet under
a tidal wave of voracious self-reproducing nanodevices - the Singularity
is inevitable. The most-quoted estimate for the Singularity is 2035
- within your lifetime! - although many, including I, think that the Singularity
may occur substantially sooner.

Power - An entity from beyond the Singularity.
Transcend, Transcended, Transcendence - The act of reprogramming
oneself to be smarter, reprogramming (with one's new intelligence) to be
smarter still, and so on ad Singularitum. The "Transcend"
is the metaphorical area where the Powers live.
Beyond - The grey area between being human and being a Power;
the domain inhabited by entities smarter than human, but not possessing
the technology to reprogram themselves directly and Transcend.

"I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that Nature played
a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to really comprehend
its magnitude."
-- Calvin and Hobbes

But why should the Powers be so much more than we are now?
Why not assume that we'll get a little smarter, and that's it?

Consider the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. Consider the iteration
of F(x) = (x + x). Every couple of years, computer performance doubles.
(1)
That is the demonstrated rate of improvement as overseen by constant, unenhanced
minds - progress according to mortals.

Right now the amount of networked silicon computing power on the planet
is slightly above the power of a human brain. The power of a human
brain is 10^17 ops/sec, or one hundred million billion operations per second
(2), versus a billion
or so computers on the Internet with somewhere between 100 millions ops/sec
and 1 billion ops/sec apiece. The total amount of computing
power on the planet is the amount of power in a human brain, 10^17 ops/sec,
multiplied by the number of humans, presently six billion or 6x10^9.
The amount of artificial computing power is so small as to be irrelevant,
not because there are so many humans, but because of the sheer raw power
of a single human brain.

At the old rate of progress, when the original Singularity calculations
were performed in 1988 (3),
computers were expected to reach human-equivalent levels - 10^17 floating-point
operations per second, or one hundred petaflops - at around 2035.
But at that rate of progress, one-teraflops machines were expected in 2000;
as it turned out, one-teraflops machines were around in 1996, when this
document was first written. In 1998 the top speed was 3.2 teraflops,
and in 1999 IBM announced the
Blue Gene project to build a petaflops machine by 2005. So the
old estimates may be a little conservative.

Once we have human-equivalent computers, the amount of computing power
on the planet is equal to the number of humans
plus the number of
computers. The amount of intelligence available takes a huge jump.
Ten years later,
humans become a vanishing quantity in the equation.

That doubling sequence is actually a pessimistic projection,
because it assumes that computing power continues to double at the same
rate. But why? Computer speeds don't double due to some inexorable
physical law, but because researchers and engineers find ways to make faster
chips. If some of the researchers and engineers are themselves
computers...

A group of human-equivalent computers spends 2 years to double computer
speeds. Then they spend another 2 subjective years, or 1 year
in human terms, to double it again. Then they spend another 2 subjective
years, or six months, to double it again. After four years total,
the computing power goes to infinity.

That is the "Transcended" version of the doubling sequence. Let's
call the "Transcend" of a sequence {a0, a1, a2...}
the function where the interval between an and an+1
is inversely proportional to an. (4).
So a Transcended doubling function starts with 1, in which case it takes
1 time-unit to go to 2. Then it takes 1/2 time-units to go to 4.
Then it takes 1/4 time-units to go to 8. This function, if it were
continuous, would be the hyperbolic function y = 2/(2 - x). When
x
= 2, then (2 - x) = 0 and y = infinity. The
behavior at that point is known mathematically as a singularity.

And the Transcended doubling sequence is also a pessimistic projection,
not a Singularity at all, because it assumes that only speed is
enhanced. What if the quality of thought were enhanced?
Right now, two years of work - well, these days, eighteen months of work.
Eighteen subjective months of work suffices to double computing speeds.
Shouldn't this improve a bit with thought-sharing and eidetic memories?
Shouldn't this improve if, say, the total sum of human scientific knowledge
is stored in predigested, cognitive, ready-to-think format? Shouldn't
this improve with short-term memories capable of holding the whole of human
knowledge? A human-equivalent AI isn't "equivalent" - if Kasparov
had had even the smallest, meanest automatic chess-playing program integrated
solidly with his intuitions, he would have beat Deep Blue into a pulp.
That's The
AI Advantage: Simple tasks carried out at blinding speeds and
without error, conscious tasks carried out with perfect memory and total
self-awareness.

I haven't even started on the subject of AIs redesigning their
cognitive architectures, although they'll have a far easier time of it
than we would - especially if they can make backups. Transcended
doubling might run up against the laws of physics before reaching
infinity... but even the laws of physics as now understood would
allow one gram (more or less) to store and run the entire human race at
a million subjective years per second. (5).

Let's take a deep breath and think about that for a moment. One
gram. The entire human race. One million years
per second. That means, using only this planetary mass for computing
power, it would be possible to support more people than the entire Universe
could support if biological humans colonized every single planet.
It means that, in a single day, a civilization could live over 80 billion
years, several times older than the age of the Universe to date.

The peculiar thing is that most people who talk about "the laws of physics"
setting hard limits on Powers would never even dream of setting the same
limits on a (merely) galaxy-spanning civilization of (normal) humans a
(brief) billion years old. Part of that is simply a cultural convention
of science fiction; interstellar civilizations can break any physical law
they please, because the readers are used to it. But part of that
is because scientists and science-fiction authors have been taught, so
many times, that Ultimate Unbreakable Limits usually fall to human ingenuity
and a few generations of time. Nobody dares say what might be possible
a billion years from now because that is a simply unimaginable amount
of time.

We know that change crept at a snail's pace a mere millennium ago, and
that even a hundred years ago it would have been impossible to place
correct limits on the ultimate power of technology. We know that
the past could never have placed limits on the present, and so we don't
try to place limits on the future. But with transhumans, the analogy
is not to Lord Kelvin, nor Aristotle, nor to a hunter-gatherer - all of
whom had human intelligence - but to a Neanderthal. With Powers,
to a fish. And yet, because the power of higher intelligence is not
as publicly recognized as the power of a few million years - because we
have no history of naysayers being embarrassed by transhumans instead
of mere time - some of us still sit, grunting around the fire, setting
ultimate limits on the sharpness of spears; some of us still swim about,
unblinking, unable to engage in abstract thought, but knowing that the
entire Universe is, must be, wet.

To convey the rate of progress driven by smarter researchers,
I needed to invent a function more complex than the doubling function used
above. We'll call this new function T(n). You
can think of T(n) as representing the largest number conceivable
to someone with an n-neuron brain. More formally, T(n)
is defined as the longest block of 1s produced by any halting n-state
Turing
Machine acting on an initially blank tape. If you're familiar
with computers but not Turing Machines, consider T(n) to
be the largest number that can be produced by a computer program with n
instructions. Or, if you're an information theorist, think of T(n)
as the inverse function of complexity; it produces the largest number with
complexity n or less.

The sequence produced by iterating T(n), S{n}
= T(S{n - 1}), is constant for very low values of n.
S{0}
is defined to be 0; a program of length zero produces no output.
This corresponds to a Universe empty of intelligence. T(1) = 1.
This corresponds to an intelligence not capable of enhancing itself; this
corresponds to where we are now. T(2) = 3. Here begins
the leap into the Abyss. Once this function increases at all, it
immediately tapdances off the brink of the knowable. T(3) = 6?
T(6) = 64?

T(64) = vastly more than 1080, the number of atoms
in the Universe. T(1080) is something that only
a Transcendent entity will ever be able to calculate, and that only if
Transcendent entities can create new Universes, maybe even new laws of
physics, to supply the necessary computing power. Even T(64)
will probably never be known to any strictly human being.

Now take the Transcended version of S{n}, starting at
2. Half a time-unit later, we have 3. A third of a time-unit
after that, 6. A sixth later - one whole unit after this function
started - we have 64. A sixty-fourth later, 10^80. An unimaginably
tiny fraction of a second later... Singularity.

Is S{n} really a good model of the Singularity?
Of course not. "Good model of the Singularity" is an oxymoron; that's
the whole
point; the Singularity will outrun any model a human could
have formulated a hundred years ago, and the Singularity will outrun any
model we formulate today. (6)

The main objection, though, would be that S{n} is an
ungrounded metaphor. The Transcended doubling sequence models faster
researchers. It's easy to say that S{n} models smarter
researchers, but what does smarter actually mean in this context?

Smartness is the measure of what you see as obvious, what you
can see as obvious in retrospect, what you can invent, and
what you can comprehend. To be more precise about it, smartness
is the measure of your semantic primitives (what is simple in retrospect),
the way in which you manipulate the semantic primitives (what is obvious),
the structures your semantic primitives can form (what you can comprehend),
and the way you can manipulate those structures (what you can invent).
If you speak complexity theory, the difference between obvious and
obvious
in retrospect, or inventable and
comprehensible, is like
the difference between NP and P.

All humans who have not suffered neural injuries have the same semantic
primitives. What is obvious in retrospect to one is obvious
in retrospect to all. (Four notes: First, by "neural injuries"
I do not mean anything derogatory - it's just that a person missing the
visual cortex will not have visual semantic primitives. If certain
neural pathways are severed, people not only lose their ability to see
colors; they lose their ability to remember or imagine colors.
Second, theorems in math may be obvious in retrospect only to mathematicians
- but anyone else who acquired the
skill would have the ability
to see it. Third, to some extent what we speak of as obvious
involves not just the symbolic primitives but very short links between
them. I am counting the primitive link types as being included under
"semantic primitives". When we look at a thought-sequence and see
it as being obvious in retrospect, it is not necessarily a single
semantic primitive, but is composed of a very short chain of semantic primitives
and link types. Fourth, I apologize for my tendency to dissect my
own metaphors; I really can't help it.)

Similarly, the human cognitive architecture is universal. We all
have the same sorts of underlying mindstuff. Though the nature of
this mindstuff is not necessarily known, our ability to communicate with
each other indicates that, whatever we are communicating, it is the same
on both sides. If any two humans share a set of concepts, any structure
composed of those concepts that is understood by one will be understood
by the other.

Different humans may have different degrees of the ability to manipulate
and structure concepts; different humans may see and invent different
things. The great breakthroughs of physics and engineering did not
occur because a group of people plodded and plodded and plodded for generations
until they found an explanation so complex, a string of ideas so long,
that only time could invent it. Relativity and quantum physics and
buckyballs and object-oriented programming all happened because someone
put together a short, simple, elegant semantic structure in a way that
nobody had ever thought of before. Being a little bit smarter
is where revolutions come from. Not time. Not hard work.
Although hard work and time were usually necessary, others had worked far
harder and longer without result. The essence of revolution is raw
smartness.

Now think about the Singularity. Think about a chimpanzee trying
to understand integral calculus. Think about the people with damaged visual
neurology who cannot remember what it was like to see, who cannot imagine
the color red or visualize two-dimensional structures. Think about
a visual cortex with trillions of times as many neuron-equivalents.
Think about twenty thousand distinct colors in the rainbow, none a shade
of any other. Think about rotating fifty-dimensional objects. Think
about attaching semantic primitives to the pixels, so that one could see
a rainbow of ideas in the same way that we see a rainbow of colors.

Our semantic primitives even determine what we can know.
Why does anything exist at all? Nobody knows. And yet the answer
is obvious. The First Cause must be obvious. It has
to be obvious to
Nothing, present in the absence of anything else,
a substance formed from -blank-, a conclusion derived without data
or initial assumptions. What is it that evokes conscious
experience, the stuff that minds are made of? We are made
of conscious experiences. There is nothing we experience more
directly. How does it work? We don't have a clue. Two
and a half millennia of trying to solve it and nothing to show for
it but "I think therefore I am." The solutions seem to be necessarily
simple, yet are demonstrably imperceptible. Perhaps the solutions
operate outside the representations that can be formed with the human brain.

If so, then our descendants, successors, future selves will figure out
the semantic primitives necessary and alter themselves to perceive them.
The Powers will dissect the Universe and the Reality until they understand
why anything exists at all, analyze neurons until they understand qualia.
And that will only be the beginning. It won't end there.
Why should there be only two hard problems? After all, if not for
humans, the Universe would apparently contain only one hard problem, for
how could a non-conscious thinker formulate the hard problem of consciousness?
Might there be states of existence beyond mere consciousness - transsentience?
Might solving the nature of reality create the ability to create new Universes,
manipulate the laws of physics, even alter the kind of things that can
be real - "ontotechnology"? That's what the Singularity
is all about.

So before you talk about life as a Power or the Utopia to come - a favorite
pastime of transhumanists and Extropians
is to discuss the problems of uploading, life after
being uploaded, and so on - just remember that you probably have a much
better chance of solving both hard problems than you do of making a valid
statement about the future. This goes for me too. I'll stand
by everything I said about humans, including our inability to understand
certain things, but everything I said about the Powers is almost certainly
wrong. "They'll figure out the semantic primitives necessary and
alter themselves to perceive them." Wrong. "Figure out."
"Semantic primitives." "Alter." "Perceive." I would bet
on all of these terms becoming obsolete after the Singularity. There
are better ways and I'm sure They - or It, or [sound of exploding brain]
will "find them".

I would like to introduce a unit of post-Singularity progress, the Perceptual
Transcend or PT.

[Brief pause while audience collapses in helpless laughter.]

A Perceptual Transcend occurs when all things that were comprehensible
become
obvious in retrospect, and all things that were inventable
become obvious. A Perceptual Transcend occurs when the semantic
structures of one generation become the semantic primitives of the next.
To put it another way, one PT from now, the whole of human knowledge
becomes perceivable in a single flash of experience, in the same way
that we now perceive an entire picture at once.

Computers are a PT above humans when it comes to arithmetic - sort of.
While we need to manipulate an entire precarious pyramid of digits, rows
and columns in order to multiply 62305 by 10358, a computer can spit out
the answer - 645355190 - in a single obvious step. These computers
aren't actually a PT above us at all, for two reasons. First of all,
they just handle numbers up to two billion instead of 9; after that they
need to manipulate pyramids too. Far more importantly, they don't
notice anything about the numbers they manipulate, as humans do.
If you multiply 23704 by 14223, using the wedding-cake method of multiplication,
you won't multiply 23704 by 2 twice in a row; you'll just steal the results
from last time. If one of the interim results is 12345 or 99999 or
314159, you'll notice that, too. The way computers manipulate numbers
is actually less powerful than the way we manipulate numbers.

Would the Powers settle for less? A PT above us, multiplication
is carried out automatically but with full attention to interim
results, numbers that happen to be prime, and the like. If I were
designing one of the first Powers - and, down at the Singularity
Institute, this is what we're doing - I would create an entire subsystem
for manipulating numbers, one that would pick up on primality, complexity,
and all the numeric properties known to humanity. A Power would understand
why
62305 times 10358 equals 645355190, with the same understanding that would
be achieved by a top human mathematician who spent hours studying all the
numbers involved. And at the same time, the Power will multiply the
two numbers automatically.

For such a Power, to whom numbers were true semantic primitives, Fermat's
Last Theorem and the Goldbach Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis might
be obvious. Somewhere in the back of its mind, the Power would
test each statement with a million trials, subconsciously manipulating
all the numbers involved to find why they were not the sum of two
cubes or why they were the sum of two primes or why their
real part was equal to one-half. From there, the Power could intuit
the most basic, simple solution simply by generalizing. Perhaps human
mathematicians, if they could perform the arithmetic for a thousand trials
of the Riemann Hypothesis, examining every intermediate step, looking for
common properties and interesting shortcuts, could intuit a formal solution.
But they can't, and they certainly can't do it subconsciously, which is
why the Riemann Hypothesis remains unobvious and unproven - it is a conceptual
structure
instead of a conceptual primitive.

Perhaps an even more thought-provoking example is provided by our visual
cortex. On the surface, the visual cortex seems to be an image processor.
In a modern computer graphics engine, an image is represented by a two-dimensional
array of pixels (7).
To rotate this image - to cite one operation - each pixel's rectangular
coordinates {x, y} are converted to polar coordinates {theta, r}. All thetas,
representing the angle, have a constant added. The polar coordinates
are then converted back to rectangular. There are ways to optimize
this process, and ways to account for intersecting and empty pixels on
the new array, but the essence is clear: To perform an operation
on an entire picture, perform the operation on each pixel in that picture.

At this point, one could say that a Perceptual Transcend depends on
what level you're looking at the operation. If you view yourself
as carrying out the operation pixel by pixel, it is an unimaginably tedious
cognitive structure, but if you view the whole thing in a single lump,
it is a cognitive primitive - a point made in Hofstadter's Ant Fugue when
discussing ants and colonies. Not very exciting unless it's Hofstadter
explaining it, but there's more to the visual cortex than that.

For one thing, we consciously experience redness. (If you're not
sure what conscious experience
a.k.a. "qualia" means, the short version is that you are not the one who
speaks
your thoughts, you are the one who hears your thoughts.) Qualia
are the stuff making up the indescribable difference between red
and green.

The term "semantic primitive" describes more than just the level at
which symbols are discrete, compact objects. It describes the level
of conscious perception. Unlike the computer manipulating numbers
formed of bits, and like the imagined Power manipulating theorems formed
of numbers, we don't lose any resolution in passing from the pixel level
to the picture level. We don't suddenly perceive the idea "there
is a bear in front of me"; we see a picture of a bear, containing millions
of pixels, every one of which is consciously experienced simultaneously.
A Perceptual Transcend isn't "just" the imposition of a new cognitive level;
it turns the cognitive structures into consciously experienced primitives.

"To put it another way, one PT from now, the whole of human knowledge
becomes perceivable in a single flash of experience, in the same way
that we now perceive an entire picture at once."

Of course, the PT won't be used as a post-Singularity unit of progress.
Even if it were initially, it won't be too long before "PT" itself is Transcended
and the Powers jump out of the system yet again. After all, the Singularity
is ultimately as far beyond me, the author, as it is beyond any other human,
and so my PTs will be as worthless a description as the doubling sequence
discarded so long ago. Even if we accept the PT as the basic unit
of measure, it simply introduces a secondary Singularity. Maybe the
Perceptual Transcends will occur every two consciously experienced years
at first, but then will occur every conscious year, and then every conscious
six months - get the picture?

It's like the "Birthday Cantatatata..." in Hofstadter's
book
Godel, Escher, Bach. You
can start with the sequence {1, 2, 3, 4 ...} and jump out of it to w
(omega), the symbol for infinity. But then one has {w, w
+
1, w + 2 ... }, and we jump out again to 2w. Then 3w,
and 4w, and w2 and
w3 and ww
and w^(ww) and higher towers of w until
we jump out to the ordinal
e0, which includes all exponential
towers of ws.

The PTs may introduce a second Singularity, and a third Singularity,
and a fourth, until Singularities are coming faster and faster and the
first w-Singularity is imminent -

Or the Powers may simply jump beyond that system. The Birthday
Cantatatata... was written by a human - admittedly Douglas Hofstadter,
but still a human - and the concepts involved in it may be Transcended
by the very first transhuman.

It's hard to appreciate the Singularity properly without
first appreciating really large numbers. I'm not talking about little
tiny numbers, barely distinguishable from zero, like the number of atoms
in the Universe or the number of years it would take a monkey to duplicate
the works of Shakespeare. I invite you to consider what was, circa
1977, the largest number ever to be used in a serious mathematical proof.
The proof, by Ronald L.
Graham, is an upper bound to a certain question of Ramsey theory.
In order to explain the proof, one must introduce a new notation, due to
Donald
E. Knuth in the article Coping With Finiteness. The notation
is usually a small arrow, pointing upwards, here abbreviated as ^.
Written as a function:

3^^3 = 3^(3^3) = 3^27 = 7,625,597,484,987. Larger than 27, but
so small I can actually type it. Nobody can visualize seven trillion
of anything, but we can easily understand it as being on roughly the same
order as, say, the gross national product.

3^^^3 = 3^^(3^^3) = 3^(3^(3^(3^...^(3^3)...))). The "..." is 7,625,597,484,987
threes long. In other words, 3^^^3 or arrow(3,
3, 3) is an exponential tower of threes 7,625,597,484,987 levels high.
The number is now beyond the human ability to understand, but the procedure
for producing it can be visualized. You take x=1. You
let x equal 3^x. Repeat seven trillion times.
While the very first stages of the number are far too large to be contained
in the entire Universe, the exponential tower, written as "3^3^3^3...^3",
is still so small that it could be stored on a modern supercomputer.

3^^^^3 = 3^^^(3^^^3) = 3^^(3^^(3^^...^^(3^^3)...)). Both the number
and the procedure for producing it are now beyond human visualization,
although the procedure can be understood. Take a number x=1.
Let
x
equal an exponential tower of threes of height x.
Repeat 3^^^3 times, where 3^^^3 equals an exponential tower seven trillion
threes high.

And yet, in the words of Martin Gardner: "3^^^^3 is unimaginably
larger than 3^^^3, but it is still small as finite numbers go, since most
finite numbers are very much larger."

And now, Graham's number. Let x equal
3^^^^3, or the unimaginable number just described above. Let x equal
3^^^^^^^(x arrows)^^^^^^^3. Repeat 63 times, or 64 including
the starting 3^^^^3.

Graham's number is far beyond my ability to grasp. I can describe
it, but I cannot properly appreciate it. (Perhaps Graham can appreciate
it, having written a mathematical proof that uses it.) This number
is far larger than most people's conception of infinity. I
know that it was larger than mine. My sense of awe when I first encountered
this number was beyond words. It was the sense of looking upon something
so much larger than the world inside my head that my conception
of the Universe was shattered and rebuilt to fit. All theologians
should face a number like that, so they can properly appreciate what they
invoke by talking about the "infinite" intelligence of God.

My happiness was completed when I learned that the actual answer
to
the Ramsey problem that gave birth to that number - rather than the upper
bound - was probably six.

Why was all of this necessary, mathematical aesthetics aside?
Because until you understand the hollowness of the words "infinity", "large"
and "transhuman", you cannot appreciate the Singularity. Even appreciating
the Singularity is as far beyond us as visualizing Graham's number is to
a chimpanzee. Farther beyond us than that. No human analogies
will ever be able to describe the Singularity, because we are only human.

The number above was forged of the human mind. It is nothing but
a finite positive integer, though a large one. It is composite and
odd, rather than prime or even; it is perfectly divisible by three.
Encoded in the decimal digits of that number, by almost any encoding scheme
one cares to name, are all the works ever written by the human hand, and
all the works that could have been written, at a hundred thousand words
per minute, over the age of the Universe raised to its own power a thousand
times. And yet, if we add up all the base-ten digits the result will
be divisible by nine. The number is still a finite positive integer.
It may contain Universes unimaginably larger than this one, but it is still
only a number. It is a number so small that the algorithm to produce
it can be held in a single human mind.

The Singularity is beyond that. We cannot pigeonhole it by stating
that it will be a finite positive integer. We cannot say anything
at all about it, except that it will be beyond our understanding.

If you thought that Knuth's arrow notation produced some fairly large
numbers, what about T(n)? How many states does a Turing machine
need to implement the calculation above? What is the complexity of
Graham's
number, C(Graham)? Probably on the order of 100. And moreover,
T(C(Graham)) is likely to be much, much larger than Graham's number.
Why go through
x = 3^(x ^s)^3 only 64 times? Why not
3^^^^3 times? That'd probably be easier, since we already need to
generate 3^^^^3, but not 64. And with the extra space, we might even
be able to introduce an even more computationally complex algorithm.
In fact, Knuth's arrow notation may not be the most powerful algorithm
that fits into C(Knuth) states.

T(n) is the metaphor for the growth rate of a self-enhancing
entity because it conveys the concept of having additional intelligence
with which to enhance oneself. I don't know when T(n) passes
beyond the threshold of what human mathematicians can, in theory, calculate.
Probably more than
n=10 and less than n=100. The point
is that after a few iterations, we wind up with T(4294967296). Now,
I don't know what T(4294967296) will be equal to, but the winning Turing
machine will probably generate a Power whose purpose is to think of a really
large number. That's what the term "large" means.

It's all very well to talk about cognitive primitives and obviousness,
but again - what does smarter mean? The meaning of smart
can't be grounded in the Singularity - I haven't been there yet.
So what's my practical definition?

"The toughest challenge for a writer is a character brighter
than the author. It's not impossible. Puzzles the writer needs
months to solve, or to design, the character may solve in moments.
But God help the writer if his abnormally bright character is wrong!" -- Larry Niven

"Of course, I never wrote the 'important' story, the sequel about the
first amplified human. Once I tried something similar. John
Campbell's letter of rejection began: 'Sorry - you can't write this
story. Neither can anyone else.'"
-- Vernor Vinge

Smartness is that quality which makes it impossible to write a story about
a character smarter than you are. You can write about super-fast
thinkers, eidetic memories, lightning calculators; a character who learns
a dozen languages in a week, who can read a textbook in an hour, or who
can invent all kinds of wonderful stuff - as long as you don't have to
produce the actual invention. But you can't write a character with
a higher level of emotional maturity, a character who can spot the obvious
solution you missed, a character who knows (and can tell the reader) the
Meaning Of Life, a character with superhuman self-awareness. Not
unless you can do these things yourself.

Let's take a concrete example, the story Flowers for Algernon
(later the movie Charly), by Daniel Keyes. (I'm afraid I'll
have to tell you how the story comes out, but it's a Character story, not
an Idea story, so that shouldn't spoil it.) Flowers for Algernon
is about a neurosurgical procedure for intelligence enhancement.
This procedure was first tested on a mouse, Algernon, and later on a retarded
human, Charlie Gordon. The enhanced Charlie has the standard science-fictional
set of superhuman characteristics; he thinks fast, learns a lifetime of
knowledge in a few weeks, and discusses arcane mathematics (not shown).
Then the mouse, Algernon, gets sick and dies. Charlie analyzes the
enhancement procedure (not shown) and concludes that the process is basically
flawed. Later, Charlie dies.

That's a science-fictional enhanced human. A real enhanced human
would not have been taken by surprise. A real enhanced human would
realize that any simple intelligence enhancement will be a net evolutionary
disadvantage - if enhancing intelligence were a matter of a simple surgical
procedure, it would have long ago occurred as a natural mutation.
This goes double for a procedure that works on rats! (As far as I
know, this never occurred to Keyes. I selected Flowers, out
of all the famous stories of intelligence enhancement, because, for reasons
of dramatic unity, this story shows what happens to be the correct outcome.)

Note that I didn't dazzle you with an abstruse technobabble explanation
for Charlie's death; my explanation is two sentences long and can be understood
by someone who isn't an expert in the field. It's the simplicity
of smartness that's so impossible to convey in fiction, and so shocking
when we encounter it in person. All that science fiction can do to
show intelligence is jargon and gadgetry. A truly ultrasmart Charlie
Gordon wouldn't have been taken by surprise; he would have deduced his
probable fate using the above, very simple, line of reasoning. He
would have accepted that probability, rearranged his priorities, and acted
accordingly until his time ran out - or, more probably, figured out an
equally simple and obvious-in-retrospect way to avoid his fate. If
Charlie Gordon had really been ultrasmart, there would have been
no story.

There are some gaps so vast that they make all problems new. Imagine
whatever field you happen to be an expert in - neuroscience, programming,
plumbing, whatever - and consider the gap between a novice, just approaching
a problem for the first time, and an expert. Even if a thousand novices
try to solve a problem and fail, there's no way to say that a single expert
couldn't solve the problem casually, offhandedly. If a hundred well-educated
physicists try to solve a problem and fail, an Einstein might still be
able to succeed. If a thousand twelve-year-olds try for a year to
solve a problem, it says nothing about whether or not an adult is likely
to be able to solve the problem. If a million hunter-gatherers try
to solve a problem for a century, the answer might still be obvious to
any educated twenty-first-century human. And no number of chimpanzees,
however long they try, could ever say anything about whether the least
human moron could solve the problem without even thinking. There
are some gaps so vast that they make all problems new; and some of them,
such as the gap between novice and expert, or the gap between hunter-gatherer
and educated citizen, are not even hardware gaps - they deal not with the
magic of intelligence, but the magic of knowledge, or of
lack
of stupidity.

I think back to before I started studying evolutionary psychology and
cognitive science. I know that I could not then have come close to
predicting the course of the Singularity. "If I couldn't have gotten
it right then, what makes me think I can get it right now?"
I am a human, and an educated citizen, and an adult, and an expert, and
a genius... but if there is even one more gap of similar magnitude remaining
between myself and the Singularity, then my speculations will be no better
than those of an eighteenth-century scientist.

We're all familiar with individual variations in human intelligence,
distributed along the great Gaussian curve; this is the only referent most
of us have for "smarter". But precisely because these variations
fall within the design range of the human brain, they're nothing out of
the ordinary. One of the very deep truths about the human mind is
that evolution designed us to be stupid - to be blinded by ideology, to
refuse to admit we're wrong, to think "the enemy" is inhuman, to be affected
by peer pressure. Variations in intelligence that fall within the
normal design range don't directly affect this stupidity. That's
where we get the folk wisdom that intelligence doesn't imply wisdom, and
within the human range this is mostly correct (8).
The variations we see don't hit hard enough to make people appreciate
what "smarter" means.

I am a Singularitarian because I have some small appreciation of how
utterly, finally, absolutely
impossible it is to think like someone
even a little tiny bit smarter than you are. I know that we are all
missing the obvious, every day. There are no hard problems, only
problems that are hard to a certain level of intelligence. Move the
smallest bit upwards, and some problems will suddenly move from "impossible"
to "obvious". Move a substantial degree upwards, and all of them
will become obvious. Move a huge distance upwards...

And I know that my picture of the Singularity will still fall
short of the truth. I may not be modest, but I have my humility -
if I can spot anthropomorphisms and gaping logical flaws in every alleged
transhuman in every piece of science fiction, it follows that a slightly
higher-order genius (never mind a real transhuman!) could read this page
and laugh at my lack of imagination. Call it experience, call it
humility, call it self-awareness, call it the Principle of Mediocrity;
I've crossed enough gaps to believe there are more. I know, in a
dim way, just how dumb I am.

I've tried to show the Beyondness of the Singularity by brute force,
but it doesn't take infinite speeds and PTs and ws to place
something utterly beyond us. All it takes is a little tiny bit
of edge, a bit smarter, and the Beyond stares us in the face once
more. I've never been through the Singularity. I've
never been to the Transcend. I just staked out an area of the Low
Beyond. This page is devoted to communicating a sense of awe that
comes from personal experience, and is, therefore, merely human.

From my cortex, to yours; every concept here was born of a plain old
Homo
sapiens - and any impression it has made on you was likewise born of
a plain old Homo sapiens. Someone who has devoted a bit more
thought, or someone a bit more extreme; it makes no difference. Whatever
impression you got from this page has not been an accurate picture of the
far future; it has, unavoidably, been an impression of me.
And I am not the far future. Only a version of "Staring into
the Singularity" written by an actual Power could convey experience of
the actual Singularity.

Take whatever future shock this page evoked, and associate it not with
the Singularity; associate it with me, the mild, quiet-spoken fellow infinitesimally
different from the rest of humanity. Don't bother trying to extrapolate
beyond that. You can't. Nobody can - not you, not me.

Since the Internet exploded across the planet, there has been enough
networked computing power for intelligence. If the Internet were
properly reprogrammed, it would be enough to run a human brain, or a seed
AI. On the nanotechnology side, we possess machines capable of
producing arbitrary DNA sequences, and we know how to turn arbitrary DNA
sequences into arbitrary proteins (9).
We have machines - Atomic Force Probes - that can put single atoms anywhere
we like, and which have recently [1999] been demonstrated to be capable
of forming atomic bonds. Hundredth-nanometer precision positioning,
atomic-scale tweezers... the news just keeps on piling up.

If we had a time machine, 100K of information from the future could
specify a protein that built a device that would give us nanotechnology
overnight. 100K could contain the code for a seed AI. Ever
since the late 90's, the Singularity has been only a problem of software.
And software is information, the magic stuff that changes at arbitrarily
high speeds. As far as technology is concerned, the Singularity could
happen tomorrow. One breakthrough - just one major insight
- in the science of protein engineering or atomic manipulation or Artificial
Intelligence, one really good day at Webmind
or Zyvex, and the door to Singularity
sweeps open.

Drexler has written
a detailed, technical,
how-to book for nanotechnology. After stalling for thirty years,
AI is making a comeback. Computers are growing in power even faster
than their usual, pedestrian rate of doubling in power every two years.
Quate has constructed a 16-head parallel Scanning
Tunnelling Probe. [Written in '96.] I'm starting to work
out methods of coding a
transhuman AI. [Written in '98.] The first chemical bond
has been formed using an atomic-force microscope. The U.S. government
has announced its intent to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on nanotechnology
research. IBM has announced the Blue
Gene project to achieve petaflops (10) computing power by 2005, with intent to
crack the protein folding problem. The Singularity
Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Inc. has been incorporated as
a nonprofit with the express purpose of coding
a seed AI. [Written in '00.]

The exact time of Singularity is customarily predicted by taking a trend
and extrapolating it, much as The Population Bomb predicted that
we'd run out of food in 1977. For example, population growth is hyperbolic.
(Maybe you learned it was exponential in math class, but it's hyperbolic
to a much better fit than exponential.)
If that trend continues, world population reaches infinity on Aug 17, 2027,
plus or minus 1.8 years. It is, of course, impossible for the human
population to reach infinity. Some say that if we can create AIs,
then the graph might measure sentient population instead of human
population. These people are torturing the metaphor. Nobody
designed the population curve to take into account developments in AI.
It's just a curve, a bunch of numbers. It can't distort
the future course of technology just to remain on track.

If you project on a graph the minimum size of the materials we can manipulate,
it reaches the atomic level - nanotechnology
- in I forget how many years (the page vanished), but I think around 2035.
This, of course, was before the time of the Scanning
Tunnelling Microscope and "IBM" spelled out in xenon atoms. For
that matter, we now have the
artificial
atom ("You can make any kind of artificial atom - long, thin atoms
and big, round atoms."), which has in a sense obsoleted merely molecular
nanotechnology. As of '95, Drexler was giving the ballpark figure
of 2015 (11).
I suspect the timetable has been accelerated a bit since then. My
own guess would be no later than 2010.

Similarly, computing power doubles every two years
eighteen months. If we extrapolate fortythirty
fifteen years ahead we find computers with as much raw power (10^17
ops/sec) as
some people think humans have, arriving in 20352025 2015. [The previous sentence was written in
1996, revised later that year, and then revised again in 2000; hence the
peculiar numbers.] Does this mean we have the software
to spin minds? No. Does this mean we can program smarter people?
No. Does this take into account any breakthroughs
between now and then? No. Does this take into account the laws
of physics? No. Is this a detailed model of all the researchers
around the planet? No.

It's just a graph. The "amazing constancy" of Moore's Law entitles
it to consideration as a thought-provoking metaphor of the future, but
nothing more. The Transcended doubling sequence doesn't
account for how the faster computer-based researchers can get the physical
manufacturing technology for the next generation set up in picoseconds,
or how they can beat the laws of physics. That's not to say that
such things are impossible - it doesn't actually strike me as all
that likely that modern-day physics has really reached the ultimate bottom
level. Maybe there are no physical limits. The point
is that Moore's Law doesn't explain how physics can be bypassed.

Mathematics can't predict when the Singularity is coming. (Well,
it can, but it won't get it right.) Even the remarkably steady numbers,
such as the one describing the doubling rate of computing power, (A) describe
unaided human minds and (B) are speeding up, perhaps due to computer-aided
design programs. Statistics may be used to predict the future, but
they don't model it. What I'm trying to say here is that "2035"
is just a wild guess, and it might as well be next Tuesday.

In truth, I don't think in those terms. I do not "project" when
the Singularity will occur. I have a "target date". I would
like the Singularity to occur in 2005, which I think I would have a reasonable
chance of doing via AI if someone handed me a hundred million dollars a
year. The Singularity Institute
would like to finish up in 2008 or so.

Above all, I would really, really like the Singularity to arrive
before
nanotechnology, given the virtual certainty of deliberate misuse - misuse
of a purely material (and thus, amoral) ultratechnology, one powerful enough
to destroy the planet. We cannot just sit back and wait.
To quote Michael Butler, "Waiting for the bus is a bad idea if you turn
out to be the bus driver."

The most we can say about 2035 is that it seems like a reasonable upper
bound, given the current rate of progress. The lower bound?
Thirty seconds. We may not know about all the research out there,
after all.

Maybe you don't want to see humanity replaced by a bunch of "machines"
or "mutants", even superintelligent ones? You love humanity and you
don't want to see it obsoleted? You're afraid of disturbing the natural
course of existence?

Well, tough luck. The Singularity is the natural course
of existence. Every species - at least, every species that doesn't
blow itself up - sooner or later comes face-to-face with a full-blown superintelligence
(12). It happens to everyone. It will happen to us.
It will even happen to the first-stage transhumans or the initial human-equivalent
AIs.

But just because humans become obsolete doesn't mean you become
obsolete. You are not a human. You are an intelligence which,
at present, happens to have a mind unfortunately limited to human hardware.
(13).
That could change. With any luck, all persons on this planet who
live to 2035 or 2005 or whenever - and maybe some
who don't - will wind up as Powers.

Transferring a human mind into a computer system is known as "uploading";
turning a mortal into a Power is known as "upgrading". The archetypal
upload is the Moravec Transfer, proposed by Dr.
Hans Moravec in the book Mind
Children. (14).

NOTE:

The key assumption of the Moravec Transfer is that we can perfectly
simulate a single neuron, which Penrose
and Hameroff would argue is untrue. (As of 1999, a lobster neuron
has been successfully
replaced with $7.50 worth of parts bought at Radio Shack; this is minor
suggestive evidence, but it doesn't even come close to settling the issue.)
The following discussion assumes that either (A) the laws of physics are
computational or (B) we can build a "superneuron", a trans-Turing computer
that does the same thing a neuron does. (Penrose
and Hameroff have no objection to the latter proposition. If
a neuron can take advantage of deep physics to perform noncomputable operations,
we can do the same thing technologically.)

The scenario given also assumes sophisticated nanomedicine;
i.e., nanomachines capable of carrying out complex instructions in a biological
environment.

The Moravec Transfer gradually moves (rather than copies) a human
mind into a computer. You need never lose consciousness. (The
details which follow have been redesigned and fleshed out a bit (by yours
truly) from the original in Mind
Children.)

A neuron-sized robot swims up to a neuron and scans it into memory.

An external computer, in continuous communication with the robot, starts
simulating the neuron.

The robot waits until the computer simulation perfectly matches the neuron.

The robot replaces the neuron with itself as smoothly as possible, sending
inputs to the computer and transmitting outputs from the simulation of
a neuron inside the computer.

This entire procedure has had no effect on the flow of information in the
brain, except that one neuron's worth of processing is now being done inside
a computer instead of a neuron.

Repeat, neuron by neuron, until the entire brain is composed of robot neurons.

Despite this, the synapses (links) between robotic neurons are still physical;
robots report the reception of neurotransmitters at artificial dendrites
and release neurotransmitters at the end of artificial axons. In
the next phase, we replace the physical synapses with software links.

For every axon-dendrite (transmitter-receiver) pair, the inputs are no
longer reported by the robot; instead the computed axon output of the transmitting
neuron is added as a simulated dendrite to the simulation of the receiving
neuron.

At the end of this phase, the robots are all firing their axons, but none
of them are receiving anything, none of them are affecting each other,
and none of them are affecting the computer simulation.

The robots are disconnected.

You have now been placed entirely inside a computer, bit by bit, without
losing consciousness. In Moravec's words, your metamorphosis is complete.

If any of the phases seem too abrupt, the transfer of an individual
neuron, or synapse, can be spread out over as long a time as necessary.
To slowly transfer a synapse into a computer, we can use weighted factors
of the physical synapse and the computational synapse to produce the output.
The weighting would start as entirely physical and end as entirely computational.
Since we are presuming the neuron is being perfectly simulated, the weighting
affects only the flow of causality and not the actual process of events.

Slowly transferring a neuron is a bit more difficult.

4a. The robot encloses the neuron, the axons, and the dendrites with
a robotic "shell", all without disturbing the neural cell body. (That's
going to take some pretty fancy footwork, I know, but this is a thought
experiment. The Powers will be doing the actual uploading.)

4b. The robotic dendrites continue to receive inputs from other neurons,
and pass them on to the enclosed neural dendrites. The output of
the biological neuron passes along the neural axon to the enclosing robotic
axon, which reads the output and forwards it to the external synapse, unchanged.

4c. The robotic axon outputs 99% of the received biological impulse,
plus 1% of the computed robotic impulse. Since, by hypothesis, the
neuron is being perfectly simulated, this does not change the actual output
in any way, only the flow of causality.

4d. The weighting is adjusted until 100% of the output is the computed
output.

4e. The biological neuron is discarded.

Assuming we can simulate an individual neuron, and that we can replace
neurons with robotic analogues, I think that thoroughly demonstrates the
possibility of uploading, given that consciousness is strictly a function
of neurons. (And if we have immortal souls, then uploading is a
real snap. Detach soul from brain. Copy any information
not stored in soul. Attach soul to new substrate. Upload complete.)

At this point it is customary to speculate about how one goes about
eating, drinking, walking around. People state that they are unwilling
to give up physical reality, worry about whether or not they will have
sufficient computational power to simulate a hedonistic world of their
wildest desires, and so on and so on ad nauseam. Even Vinge
himself, discoverer of the Singularity, has gone on record as wondering
whether one's true self would be diluted by Transcendence.

I hope that by this point in the page you have been sufficiently impressed
by the power and scope and incomprehensibility and general Transcendence
of the Singularity that these speculations sound silly. If
you wish to remain undiluted, you will be able to arrange it. You
will be able to make backups. You will be able to preserve your personality
regardless of substrate. The only folks who have to worry about being
unwillingly
diluted are the first humans to Transcend, and even they may have nothing
to worry about if there's a Friendly, AI-born superintelligence to act
as transition guide.

Of course, it may be that any being of sufficient intelligence wants
to be diluted. Exercising anxiety over that possibility seems spectacularly
pointless, analogous to children worrying that, as adults, they will no
longer want to be thoughtlessly cruel to other children. If you want
to be diluted, it's not a wrongness that we should worry about.

Maybe, after Transcending, you'll be different. If that is so,
then that change is inevitable and there is nothing you can do about it.
The human brain has a finite number of neurons, and therefore a finite
number of possible states. Eventually, you will die, go into an eternal
loop, or Transcend. In the long run... the
really long run...
mortality isn't an option.

Likewise, there's absolutely no point in worrying that hostile Powers
will inevitably wipe out humanity. If it turns out that all goals
are ultimately arbitrary, then it is conceivable that a badly programmed
Power could wind up with goals making it hostile to humanity; this is an
engineering risk, and minimizing it is an engineering
task. But emotions like "selfishness" and "resentment" do
not spontaneously appear in artificial intelligences, hackneyed science-fictional
plot devices to the contrary. Resentment is a complex functional
adaptation which evolved in humans over the course of millions of years;
it does not simply appear out of nowhere. Even the tendency to evaluate
your own group as more valuable is an evolved one, along with the tendency
to think in terms of "us" and "them" in the first place.

Why would a generic rational superintelligence categorize humanity as
meaningless? The only circumstances under which this would be an
inevitable
conclusion is if human life is meaningless, if the lack of meaning
is an observer-independent fact. And even that wouldn't be
enough to spell out humanity's doom; the action of exterminating humanity
would also have to be meaningful, again as an observer-independent fact.
Which would mean that any sufficiently intelligent human would commit suicide.
And if that's so, one rather suspects that there's nothing we can do about
it.

Ultimately, nobody knows what lies on the other side of Singularity,
not even me. And yes, it takes courage to step through that door.
If infants could choose whether or not to leave the womb, without knowing
what lay at the end of the birth canal - without knowing if anything
lay at the end of the birth canal - how many would? But beyond the
birth canal is where reality is. It's where things happen.
Staying in the womb forever, even if we could, would be pointless and sterile.

"You know, I don't understand why humans evolved as such thoughtless,
shortsighted creatures.""Well, it can't stay that way forever.""You think we'll get smarter?""That's one of the two possibilities."

Since this document was originally written in 1996, "nanotechnology" has
gone public. I expect that everyone has now heard of the concept
of attaining complete control over the molecular structure of matter.
This would make it possible to create food from sewage, to heal broken
spinal cords, to reverse old age, to make everyone healthy and wealthy,
and to deliberately wipe out all life on the planet. Actually, the
raw, destructive military uses would probably be a lot easier than the
complex, creative uses. Anyone who's ever read a history book gets
one guess as to what happens next.

"Active shields" might suffice against accidental outbreaks of "grey
goo", but not against hardened military-grade nano, perfectly capable of
using fusion weapons to break through active shields. And yet, despite
this threat, we can't even try to suppress nanotechnology; that simply
increases the probability that the villains will get it first. (15).

Mitchell Porter calls it "The race between superweapons and superintelligence."
Human civilization will continue to change until we either create superintelligence,
or wipe ourselves out. Those are the two stable states, the two "attractors"
in the system. It doesn't matter how long it takes, or how many cycles
of nanowar-and-regrowth occur before Transcendence or final extinction.
If the system keeps changing, over a thousand years, or a million years,
or a billion years, it will eventually wind up in one attractor or the
other. But my best guess is that the issue will be settled now.

Nor is the possibility of destruction the only reason for racing to
Singularity. There is also the ongoing sum of human misery, which
is not only a practical problem, not only an ethical problem, but a purely
moral problem in its own right. There are truly horrible things going
on in the world today. If I had the choice of erasing crack neighborhoods
or erasing the Holocaust, I don't know which I'd pick. I do know
which project has a better chance of success.

Have you ever pondered the Great Questions of Life, the Universe, and
Everything? Have you ever wondered whether it really matters, cosmically
speaking, if you stay in bed this morning? Have you ever stared into
the hard problem of ethics, or consciousness, or reality, and realized
that there is no humanly-understandable justification for subjective
experience, getting out of bed, or anything existing at all? How
can we do anything, set any goals, without knowing the Meaning of Life?
How can we justify our continued participation in the rat race if we don't
know why we're running? What's it all for?

We don't know. We have to guess, and act on our best guesses.
Regardless of the absolute probabilities, superintelligence has a better
chance of discovering the true moral right, having the power to implement
it, and wanting to implement it. The state where superintelligence
exists is, with a very high degree of probability regardless of the True
Meaning of Life, preferable to the current state. That's the Interim
Meaning of Life, and it works well enough... but it's a long, long way
from certainty, or really knowing what's going on!

I have had it. I have had it with crack houses, dictatorships,
torture chambers, disease, old age, spinal paralysis, and world hunger.
I have had it with a planetary death rate of 150,000 sentient beings per
day.
I have had it with this planet. I have had it with mortality. None
of this is necessary. The time has come to stop turning away from
the mugging on the corner, the beggar on the street. It is no longer
necessary to look nervously away, repeating the mantra: "I can't
solve all the problems of the world." We can. We can
end
this.

And so I have lost, not my faith, but my suspension of disbelief.
Strange as the Singularity may seem, there are times when it seems much
more reasonable, far less arbitrary, than life as a human. There
is
a better way! Why rationalize this life? Why try to pretend
that it makes sense? Why make it seem bright and happy? There
is an alternative!

I'm not saying that there isn't fun in this life. There is.
But
any amount of sorrow is unacceptable. The time has come
to stop hypnotizing ourselves into believing that pain and unhappiness
are desirable! Maybe perfection isn't attainable, even on
the other side of Singularity, but that doesn't mean that the faults and
flaws are okay. The time has come to stop pretending it
doesn't hurt!

Our fellow humans are screaming in pain, our planet will probably be
scorched to a cinder or converted into goo, we don't know what the hell
is going on, and the Singularity will solve these problems. I declare
reaching
the Singularity as fast as possible to be the Interim Meaning of Life,
the temporary definition of Good, and the foundation until further notice
of my ethical system.

"Probably a lot of researchers on paths to the Singularity
are spending valuable time writing grant proposals, or doing things that
could be done by lab assistants. It would be a fine thing if there
were a Singularity Support Foundation to ensure that these people weren't
distracted. There is probably one researcher alive today - Hofstadter,
Drexler,
Lenat,
Moravec,
Goertzel,
Chalmers,
Quate,
someone just graduating college, or even me
- who is the person who gets to the Singularity. Every
hour that person is delayed is another hour to the Singularity.
Every hour, six thousand people die. Perhaps we should be doing something
about this person's spending a fourth of vis time and energy writing grant
proposals." (16).

This summarizes the basic principle behind accelerating the Singularity;
there is one project, somewhere, that will create greater-than-human intelligence.
That project, probably in the field of AI, will be backed by advances in
three or four other fields, such as cognitive science, high-speed "ultracomputing"
hardware, whatever previous work there's been in AI, and maybe insight-sources
such as BCI (Brain-Computer Interfaces). The researchers on these
projects eat food and wear clothes and watch television shows that have
been produced by the worldwide economy. Any productive activity,
anywhere along the chain, can count as supporting the Singularity.

To support the Singularity indirectly, you can keep plugging away at
your daily job, at least assuming you're a farmer rather than a class-action
lawyer. Neurologists can study cognitive science, computer programmers
can study AI, and try to be ready when the Singularity needs them.
And the various transhumanist organizations, such as the Extropy
Institute and Foresight, are
targetable for more immediate forms of aid.

Which is all good, but some of us would like the opportunity to accelerate
the Singularity - to directly help create a greater-than-human intelligence.

Four years after the publication of Staring 1.0, there is now
officially a Singularity Institute!
Coding has not yet begun on the AI project, but work continues on Coding
a Transhuman AI 2, and when the design document is complete, we will
begin coding and we will write a seed AI. We have - just recently,
as of this latest revised version - received tax-exempt status, and are
now accepting donations!

And the clock continues to tick, and another bit of life as we know
it burns away...

I think it's safe to say that I can now visualize a complete path leading
up to the Singularity, I have some idea of what it would take to get there
and how much it will cost, and I think we could probably do it by 2010.
Substantially earlier, given a lot of funding and research problems that
turn out to be tractable.

So the heck with Moore's Law. The Singularity will happen when
we go out and make it happen.

I'd also like to say a few things about how not to get to the
Singularity.

As an earlier version of Staring said, "This page isn't a call
to arms in the ordinary sense." I've always deeply mistrusted the
human tendency to form social organizations. Organizations tend to
perpetuate themselves, rather than solving problems. The Singularity
meme
is awesomely powerful. It must not be allowed to fall into the usual,
the easy patterns. The Singularity will not be advanced by
a cult, a mutual admiration society, or a bunch of crackpots. Drexler
faced much the same problem with nanotechnology.

The Principle of Independence,
in the Singularitarian Principles, is
one safeguard. To summarize, the Principle of Independence renounces
the idea that one Singularitarian could possess any form of authority over
another. For my own reasons, I have adopted the Singularity as a
personal goal. If I can be more efficient by working with other Singularitarians,
great. But what I care about is the Singularity, not Singularitarianism.

Another safeguard is the Principle
of Intelligence, which states that whether an idea is intelligent or
stupid takes logical precedence over whether it's pro- or anti-Singularity.
(You'd think that this would all be blatantly obvious - unless, of course,
you'd ever read a history book, or talked to other humans, or turned on
a television set or something.)

There's another safeguard that isn't in the Principles. It's the
idea I originally wrote Staring into the Singularity to emphasize.
It's this one last piece of advice: Don't go Utopian.

Don't describe Life after Singularity in glowing terms. Don't
describe it at all. I think the all-time low point in predicting
the future came in the few brief paragraphs ofUnbounding the
Future that I read, when they described a pedestrian being run over
and his hand miraculously healing. That's ridiculous. Pedestrian?
Run over? Hand?Cars in a nanotech world?
Why not just have a bunch of apes describe the ease of getting bananas
with a human mind?

"I would emphasize that I have been invited to give talks at
places like the physical sciences colloquium series at IBM's main research
center, at Xerox PARC, and so forth, so these ideas are being taken seriously
by serious technical people, but it is a mixed reaction. You want that
reaction to be as positive as possible, so I plead with everyone to please
keep the level of cultishness and bullshit down (17),
and even to be rather restrained in talking about wild consequences, which
are in fact true and technically defensible, because they don't sound that
way. People need to have their thinking grow into longer-term consequences
gradually; you don't begin there."

The problem with people expounding their Utopian visions of a nanotech
world is that their consequences aren't wild enough. Looking
at stories of instantly healing wounds, or any material object being instantly
available, doesn't give you the sense of looking into the future.
It gives you the sense that you're looking into an unimaginative person's
childhood fantasy of omnipotence, and that predisposes you to treat nanotechnology
the same way. Worse, it attracts other people with unimaginative
fantasies of omnipotence. There's no better way to turn into a bunch
of parlor pinks, sipping coffee and planning the Revolution without actually
doing anything.

I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh on the nano-Utopia types. Some
of them may be actual researchers or science-fiction writers or other people
doing useful things; some of them may be rank-and-file sincerely trying
to make it happen who just got caught in the general lack of imagination;
and of course, none of them have been to the Low
Beyond. Once you've read this page, though, there's no excuse.

This page is about staring into the Singularity. It is about awe,
the Beyond, the end of history, and things beyond human comprehension.
It is intended to invoke a sense of future, and I hope that my readers
will be inclined to view nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, neurology,
and all the other paths to the Singularity in the same way - as part of
the future.

I hope that attracts the right sort of people.

In a moment of insanity, I subscribed to the Extropian
mailing list. These people know what "Singularity" means. In
theory, they know what's coming. And yet, even as I write [in '96
- they've improved a bit in '99], folk who really ought to know
better are arguing over whether transhumans will have enough computing
power to simulate private Universes, whether the amount of computing power
available to transhumans is limited by the laws of physics, whether someone
uploaded into a trans-computer is really the same person or just an amazing
soybean imitation, and - least believably of all - whether our unimaginably
intelligent future selves will still be having sex.

Why is this our concern? Why do we need to know this?
Can it not be that maybe, just maybe, these problems can
wait until
after we're five times as smart and some of our blind
spots have been filled? Right now, every human being on this planet
has one concern: How do we get to the Singularity as fast as possible?
What happens afterward is
not our problem and I deplore those
gosh-wow, unimaginative, so-cloying-they-make-you-throw-up, and just plain
boring
and unimaginative pictures of a future with unlimited resources and completely
unaltered mortals. Leave the problems of transhumanity to the
transhumans. Our chances of getting anything right are the same
as a fish designing a working airplane out of algae and pebbles.

Our sole responsibility is to produce something smarter than we are;
any problems beyond that are not ours to solve.

How do we keep the world economy running for at least another ten years?
Who's willing to fund an AI project? Who do we need to recruit for
an AI project? How can we avoid the standard technophobic backlash?
And what do we do if nanotech comes first?

These are the practical questions that will be faced in the immediate
future. The correct questions, and the answers, are the proper
concern of mailing lists. [And, as of
'00, the Singularity Institute.]
I don't object to letting the imagination run free. That's how all
this got started, after all. But don't get so emotionally
involved
in it, don't try to claim that your visualization of the Other Side of
Dawn has a chance of being correct, and spend your time making
the Singularity instead.

2: The power of a human brain is estimated to be between 10^11 and
10^26 floating-point operations per second. The figure used here
is 10^17 ops/sec, derived by assuming 10^11 neurons, 10^3 synapses per
neuron, and a firing rate of around two hundred spikes per second, plus
a factor of five for good luck, yielding 10^17. For more sophisticated
calculations, yielding an answer of 10^14 ops/sec, see Hans Moravec's When
will computer hardware match the human brain?

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